TurboSVM-FL

[AAAI 2024] TurboSVM-FL: Boosting Federated Learning through SVM Aggregation for Lazy Clients. TurboSVM-FL is a novel federated learning algorithm that can greatly reduce the number of aggregation rounds needed to approach convergence for federated classifications tasks without any additional computation burden on the client side.

🖼️ Teaser

🗼 Pipeline

The pipeline of TurboSVM-FL starts by trading client models in a model-as-sample strategy and fitting support vector machine (SVM) on these samples. Then, it carries out selective aggregation using only the class embeddings that form support vectors. Further, it conducts max-margin spread-out regularization on aggregated global representations that are projected back onto the SVM separation hyperplane.

💁 Usage

1. Download data and carry out data preprocessing following the instructions below.

2. Create conda environment with conda env create -f environment.yml.

3. Run main_non_FL.py for centralized learning; main_FL.py for federated learning; experiments.sh for reproducing experiments.

For detailed argument settings please check utils.py.

🔧 Environment

Important libraries and their versions by January 25th, 2024:

Library	Version
Python	3.11.7 by Anaconda
PyTorch	2.1.2 for CUDA 12.1
TorchMetrics	1.2.1
Scikit-Learn	1.4.0
WandB	0.16.2

Others:

• There is no requirement on OS for the experiment itself. However, for data preprocessing, Python environment on Linux is desired. If data preprocessing is done in Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL or WSL2), please make sure unzip is installed beforehand, i.e. sudo apt install unzip for WSL2 Ubuntu.

• We used Weights & Bias for figures instead of tensorboard. Please install and set up it properly beforehand.

• We used the Python function match in our implementation. This function only exists for Python version >= 3.10. Please replace it with if-elif-else statement if needed.

🗺 Instructions on data preprocessing

We conducted experiments using three datasets: FEMNIST, CelebA, and Shakespeare (the Covid-19 dataset is not used anymore). The datasets can be obtained on LEAF together with bash code for reproducible data split.

Please dive into the data directory for further instructions.

📋 Citation

If you use this code, please cite our paper:

@article{Wang_2024,
   title={TurboSVM-FL: Boosting Federated Learning through SVM Aggregation for Lazy Clients},
   volume={38},
   ISSN={2159-5399},
   url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i14.29481},
   DOI={10.1609/aaai.v38i14.29481},
   number={14},
   journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
   publisher={Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)},
   author={Wang, Mengdi and Bodonhelyi, Anna and Bozkir, Efe and Kasneci, Enkelejda},
   year={2024},
   month=mar, pages={15546–15554}
}